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06 February 2013

The cosmopolitan imagination of neoliberalism

Regression to the nation form
Part 1 of 2
I’m glad that Paul raised the dangerous new nationalist energies starting to build in East Asia. Last year I
started to lay out a
historical account of the progressive potential that neoliberalism opened up to
overcome the nation form, and the alarming threat to that potential
posed by populist attacks on neoliberalism. I still need to come back to that
general account; here I will begin to explore the growing tensions within countries that have produced the rise of nationalist politics.

The New York Times noted
Russia’s growing xenophobia in a
recent article. Following the enactment on December 28 of a
law to bar Americans from adopting Russian children (which passed the Duma 400
to 4, with two abstentions), the legislature will now consider a variety of
laws targeting foreigners and Russians who have connections abroad:

A full ban on all foreign adoption. A requirement that the
children of Russian officials return directly to Russia after studying abroad,
lest their parent lose his or her post. A requirement that officials’ children
be barred from studying abroad altogether. A requirement that movie theaters
screen Russian-made films no less than 20 percent of the time, or face fines as
high as 400,000 rubles, or about $13,000.

One group of legislators is working on a bill that would
prevent anyone with foreign citizenship, including Russians, from criticizing
the government on television. One proposal would ban the use of foreign
driver’s licenses, another would require officials to drive Russian-made cars.
One deputy has recommended strictly limiting marriages between Russian
officials and foreigners, at least those from states that were not formerly
Soviet.

The journalist doesn’t provide much by way of explanation,
but does emphasize that this wave of patriotism is directed not against foreign
countries but at Russia’s own elite. One quote from Sergei Markov, a political
analyst and former legislator, provides considerable insight:

“The population considers the elite to be half-foreign,” he
said. “Their property is abroad, their houses are abroad, their wives are
abroad, their children are abroad. Even Russian industrialists work through
offshore companies. Why do these people run Russia, they say.”

The resonance of this line of thinking is not unique to
Russia. In every major country, the neoliberal global economy has
generated a cosmopolitan business elite comfortable in conference rooms and
luxury hotels the world over, but with very little in common with that
increasing share of their countrymen who have been left behind. They congregate
in and travel among the centers of economic power we call the global cities—New
York and Chicago, Moscow and Peterburg, Beijing and Shanghai, London, Tōkyō, Dubai,
Hong Kong, Mumbai.

These people, together with the well-educated, high-level
administrators, journalists, professors, lawyers, and other elite professionals
who move in the same circles, are those most susceptible to the liberal-minded,
optimistic form of neoliberal ideology that is grounded in an apprehension of
society as an aggregate (in contrast to the petty, resentful neoliberal ideology of
the
Tea Party and other victims of neoliberal society). It’s important to
understand that these people believe in neoliberal ideology not because they are looking to
rationalize their own success or to salve their consciences over those who are
sacrificed. Rather, elite neoliberal ideology is appealing because it makes
sense of their own lived experience, as people who succeeded in their
professional lives through great individual effort, and because its
prescriptions
proved efficacious (until
recently) in managing their businesses, in governing the economy, and in
interpreting the world around them. Moreover, the obstacles they have faced have
come primarily from the hobgoblins of neoliberal ideology, namely systems of
patronage and parasitism that often coordinate affairs below the elite
level (“corruption”) and the various forms of state
intervention that are known as “authoritarianism”.

This is especially true of those on the frontiers of
neoliberalism, those whose countries were part of the second great wave of
neoliberalization that incorporated huge new parts of the globe with incredible
speed in the years 1989-1991: Russia, China, India. In these countries, elite
neoliberals face much more acute forms of “corruption” and “authoritarianism”
than their counterparts in the developed world. I will try to indicate in part
2 of this post why that is, but for the moment let us remain within the subjectivity
of elite neoliberals.

To them, corruption and authoritarianism are not features of
contemporary society but perverse vestiges of a barbaric past, alternately
identified as “socialism” or “feudalism”—or both, since “socialism” is often
defined as a special case of “feudalism”. Thus a Russian critic characterizes the legislation before the Duma as “increasingly absurd, archaic
and aggressive measures” defended with “medieval rhetoric”. An Indian analyst roots corruption in his country in “feudal mindsets”. A
Chinese social scientist writes,

After our country’s revolutionary victory, in building a
political system we basically imported the Stalin model of highly concentrated
power, but because of the enduring influence of feudalism, this centralism
often took on the characteristics of feudal despotism.... [T]hrough more than 30 years of reforms, we
have made much progress in de-Sovietizing the economy, but in the political
system there are many domains that have not cast off the Soviet model.

It is precisely the personalized forms of coercion or
domination that, to the neoliberals, distinguish these anachronistic behaviors
from the freedom and efficiency of “Western” ways of business, governance, and
culture. So the Russian critic above identifies her fellow dissidents as “enlightened,
modern and Western-oriented people”. Or the writers of the Nanfang Media Group 南方报业传媒集团, publisher of the most prominent voices of liberal criticism in
China, constantly compare the advanced practices of Western countries to
benighted Chinese norms. It’s but a short step from here to an explanation of the persistence
of feudal remnants that blames “Chinese”/“Indian”/“Russian” culture and its
grip on the people of China/India/Russia.

This is a step that is all too commonly taken by elite
neoliberals. Increasingly, and ominously, critics of neoliberalism are taking the
same step but with the signs reversed, and grounding their opposition to
neoliberalism in their native soil.

This guy, at least, seems convinced that the U.S. has very much put the crisis behind it and it's full steam ahead from this point on. He even thinks Europe will emerge stronger and more economically robust after all is said and done. A key point of support he invokes, among other stuff, is the coming energy boom, for which he provides lots of dazzling statistics about the amazing effects this will have on the U.S. economy. Much of this is overblown, of course, but is it all smoke and mirrors? In any case, this piece seems to be a condensed presentation of the kinds of stories that the neoliberal elite is probably telling itself right now. They definitely still seem convinced they can restore robust growth, which would mitigate - at least in the U.S. and Europe - the simmering nationalist tensions that are beginning to emerge all over the place and that recent posts have highlighted. I'd be interested in hearing what others think about the neoliberal outlook for the future: is it sheer ideology at this point, insofar as the underlying contradictions that produced the crisis persist and go unrecognized? Or is there any measure of truth to these kinds of forecasts?

I appreciate this reading of what those in the know call the BRIC(S) -- Brazil, Russia, India, China (and occasionally they throw in South Africa so as to not appear to be leaving Africa behind. Thinking about them in terms of cosmopolitanism, an ideology that was last normatively employed before the first world war, draws what I think are some necessary connections between that period and now.

Not to be deterministic or vulgarly materialist, but the connections between contemporary globalization and the international trade system at the beginning of the last century are far too obvious to ignore. It was, in fact, only around five years ago that the current wave of globalization exceeded the previous one by value (it had long since surpassed it in volume, of course). The mobility of high-end labor, and especially of capital, is obviously related to the issue of the foreignness of elites as compared to the average citizen.

The even darker sides of these trends coincide as well. The logic of patriotic and populist movements in the west (and the BRIC[S]) almost mirrors that of the right wing populisms that rose to power at the beginning of the 1900's.

"The elite is a corrupt, foreign entity choking the common people. Their values are not our values. They are parasites. They're unlike some of the business elite (a good contemporary example might be Steve Jobs) who are productive rather than exploitative. The natural enemy of working people is not their bosses but their bosses' bankers. Etc etc etc..."

This doesn't just resemble anti-Semitic logic: it is anti-Semitic logic. I think that this confluence deserves a little more attention that it gets, both in he left and in the mainstream.